He began to divide his time between his music classes and hanging around outside the blue doorway of the house in Gali Dakotan where the tall woman lived. He learned that her name was Bombay Silk and that there were seven others like her, Bulbul, Razia, Heera, Baby, Nimmo, Mary and Gudiya, who lived together in the haveli with the blue doorway, and that they had an Ustad, a guru, called Kulsoom Bi, older than the rest of them, who was the head of the household. Aftab learned their haveli was called the Khwabgah—the House of Dreams.
At first he was shooed away because everybody, including the residents of the Khwabgah, knew Mulaqat Ali and did not want to get on the wrong side of him. But regardless of what admonition and punishment awaited him, Aftab would return to his post stubbornly, day after day. It was the only place in his world where he felt the air made way for him. When he arrived, it seemed to shift, to slide over, like a school friend making room for him on a classroom bench. Over a period of a few months, by running errands, carrying their bags and musical instruments when the residents went on their city rounds, by massaging their tired feet at the end of a working day, Aftab eventually managed to insinuate himself into the Khwabgah. Finally the day dawned when he was allowed in. He entered that ordinary, broken-down home as though he were walking through the gates of Paradise.
The blue door opened on to a paved, high-walled courtyard with a handpump in one corner and a Pomegranate tree in the other. There were two rooms set behind a deep verandah with fluted columns. The roof of one of the rooms had caved in and its walls had crumbled into a heap of rubble in which a family of cats had made its home. The room that hadn’t crumbled was a large one, and in fairly good condition. Its peeling, pale green walls were lined with four wooden and two Godrej almirahs covered with pictures of film stars—Madhubala, Waheeda Rehman, Nargis, Dilip Kumar (whose name was really Muhammad Yusuf Khan), Guru Dutt and the local boy Johnny Walker (Badruddin Jamaluddin Kazi), the comedian who could make the saddest person in the world smile. One of the cupboards had a dim, full-length mirror mounted on the door. In another corner there was a beaten-up old dressing table. A chipped and broken chandelier with only one working bulb and a long-stemmed, dark brown fan hung from the high ceiling. The fan had human qualities—she was coy, moody and unpredictable. She had a name too, Usha. Usha wasn’t young any more and often needed to be cajoled and prodded with a long-handled broom and then she would go to work, gyrating like a slow pole dancer. Ustad Kulsoom Bi slept on the only bed in the haveli with her parakeet, Birbal, in his cage above her bed. Birbal would screech as though he was being slaughtered if Kulsoom Bi was not near him at night. During Birbal’s waking hours he was capable of some weapons-grade invective that was always preceded by the half-snide, half-flirtatious Ai Hai! that he had picked up from his housemates. Birbal’s choicest insult was the one most commonly heard in the Khwabgah: Saali Randi Hijra (Sister-fucking Whore Hijra). Birbal knew all the variations. He could mutter it, say it coquettishly, in jest, with affection and with genuine, bitter anger.
Everyone else slept in the verandah, their bedding rolled up in the day like giant bolsters. In winter, when the courtyard grew cold and misty, they all crowded into Kulsoom Bi’s room. The entrance to the toilet was through the ruins of the collapsed room. Everybody took turns to bathe at the handpump. An absurdly steep, narrow staircase led to the kitchen on the first floor. The kitchen window looked out on to the dome of the Holy Trinity Church.
Mary was the only Christian among the residents of the Khwabgah. She did not go to church, but she wore a little crucifix around her neck. Gudiya and Bulbul were both Hindus and did occasionally visit temples that would allow them in. The rest were Muslim. They visited the Jama Masjid and those dargahs that allowed them into the inner chambers (because unlike biological women Hijras were not considered unclean since they did not menstruate). The most masculine person in the Khwabgah, however, did menstruate. Bismillah slept upstairs on the kitchen terrace. She was a small, wiry, dark woman with a voice like a bus horn. She had converted to Islam and moved into the Khwabgah a few years ago (the two were not connected) after her husband, a bus driver for Delhi Transport Corporation, had thrown her out of their home for not bearing him a child. Of course it never occurred to him that he might have been responsible for their childlessness. Bismillah (formerly Bimla) managed the kitchen and guarded the Khwabgah against unwanted intruders with the ferocity and ruthlessness of a professional Chicago mobster. Young men were strictly forbidden to enter the Khwabgah without her express permission. Even regular customers, like Anjum’s future client—the Man Who Knew English—were kept out and had to make their own arrangements for their assignations. Bismillah’s companion on the terrace was Razia, who had lost her mind as well as her memory and no longer knew who she was or where she came from. Razia was not a Hijra. She was a man who liked to dress in women’s clothes. However, she did not want to be thought of as a woman, but as a man who wanted to be a woman. She had stopped trying to explain the difference to people (including to Hijras) long ago. Razia spent her days feeding pigeons on the roof and steering all conversations towards a secret, unutilized government scheme (dao-pech, she called it) she had discovered for Hijras and people like herself. As per the scheme, they would all live together in a housing colony and be given government pensions and would no longer need to earn their living doing what she described as badtameezi—bad behavior—any more. Razia’s other theme was government pensions for street cats. For some reason her unmemoried, unanchored mind veered unerringly towards government schemes.
Aftab’s first real friend in the Khwabgah was Nimmo Gorakhpuri, the youngest of them all and the only one who had completed high school. Nimmo had run away from her home in Gorakhpur where her father worked as a senior-division clerk in the Main Post Office. Though she affected the airs of being a great deal older, Nimmo was really only six or seven years older than Aftab. She was short and chubby with thick, curly hair, stunning eyebrows curved like a pair of scimitars, and exceptionally thick eyelashes. She would have been beautiful but for her fast-growing facial hair that made the skin on her cheeks look blue under her make-up, even when she had shaved. Nimmo was obsessed with Western women’s fashion and was fiercely possessive of her collection of fashion magazines sourced from the second-hand Sunday book bazaar on the pavement in Daryaganj, a five-minute walk from the Khwabgah. One of the booksellers, Naushad, who bought his supply of magazines from the garbage collectors who serviced the foreign embassies in Shantipath, kept them aside, and sold them to Nimmo at a hefty discount.
“D’you know why God made Hijras?” she asked Aftab one afternoon while she flipped through a dog-eared 1967 issue of Vogue, lingering over the blonde ladies with bare legs who so enthralled her.
“No, why?”
“It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.”
Her words hit Aftab with the force of a physical blow. “How can you say that? You are all happy here! This is the Khwabgah!” he said, with rising panic.